Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Because I can't resist books, or lists, here's one more, despite have done this twicealready.

So all while somanypeople (including me) spent the month of March talking about the books which had most influenced their thinking, or whatever, my wife has been regularly updating me as to a much bigger project which children's-and-young-adult-literature power-blogger Fuse #8 had taken on: establishing the top 100 children's books (novels or stories, one should say, not picture books) of all time, via a poll of both children and adults. It was a pretty impressive bit of work, and Melissa would excitedly share with me the results as she slowly unveiled them. And now, of course, Melissa and other bookbloggers are talking about how many of the list they've read, which ones they agree with, and which ones they don't. I'm not children's or young adult literature reader myself, these days, but whom am I do deny the lure of one more list?

Thing is, in my previous lists, talking about influential books both prior to my university education and during it, I was able to easily come up with 15 that have really stayed with me. When it comes to kids' books of all sorts, I can only come up with half that number. I simply didn't read a lot of that stuff when I was between the ages of five and ten; half of my reading material then, or at least half that of what I can remember, was actually adult stuff (like Watership Down or The Lord of the Rings) which I struggled with, but which stayed with me all the same. But, after giving it some thought, I can think of eight (well, seven and a half, really) that deserve a place. As always, in alphabetical order

Lloyd ALexander, Taran Wanderer. All of The Chronicles of Prydain are wonderful, but this is the one that stuck with me. Adventure, thrills, and moral introspection, pitched at the perfect level for a 10-year-old. It didn't make Fuse's list.

RoaldDahl, The Fantastic Mr. Fox. The Dahl I like best are his various grown-up short stories, like "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar," and such. But of all his children's fiction, this was my favorite. It didn't make Fuse's list.

IngriD'Aulaire, D'Aulaires's Book of Greek Myths. My older brother Daniel and I tore this book apart, memorizing it, and acting out the stories. I got to be Hermes. It didn't make Fuse's list.

Norman Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth. I loved the puzzles in this book, the wordplay and wit. In some ways, it haunted my imagination in much the way Harry Potter came to. It came in at #10 on Fuse's list.

E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Simply adored it--in particular, adored the way it situation an adventure and a quest in a world that seemed as close-by to my ordinary life as the local library. It came in at #5 on Fuse's list.

Sterling North, Rascal. Made me want to be more independent, to live in tree houses and be friends with animals, to be able to identify bird calls and be able to smell pine trees. If I was any kind of Boy Scout, it's probably because of this book. It didn't make Fuse's list.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit. In many ways, a superior book--if not a superior work of imagination--to The Lord of the Rings itself. It came in at #12 on Fuse's list.

And finally, any or all of Donald J. Sobol'sEncyclopedia Brown books. I mean seriously, if Fuse wants her list to be taken seriously, how can you not include these? Sally Kimball will beat you up, otherwise.

Did you know Taran Wanderer was an afterthought? After he turned in High King, the publisher came back and said that Taran needed more character development, so her cranked out Taran wandered in something like 2 months. Recently reread Prydain with the eldest daughter (7) and she made it through the first 4, but wouldn't start the High King because she thought it was too scary. The contrast between Alexander and Rowling is really interesting. Alexander is the better sentence level writer, but Rowling wins on plot and character growth over time. (Nobody except Taran really changes). Dialogue is a draw. Western Dave

I love The Phantom Tollbooth - that book had a really profound effect on my childhood; like you, I really enjoyed the wordplay and the punning (the Whetherman, the Spelling Bee and the Humbug, Canby, the Not-So-Wicked Which). I also loved its playful morality-tale aspects, both in the opening chapter with Milo rushing home from school and in the penultimate rescue of the Princesses from the Daemons of Ignorance.

No, actually, I'm going to blame her! I mean, if she's going to mess with the list to make sure that elementary school votes for various Magic School Bus sequels don't overwhelm everything else, then the least she could have done was check with me to make sure all my favorites were included.

David,

That's fascinating; I would have never thought that myself, because I kind of see Taran Wanderer as being the real linchpin for the series. (And, if you're correct, than he would have had to go back and rewrite High King after finishing TW, because so many characters from that book end up becoming key soldiers in Taran's little army.) I never really compared Prydain and Harry Potter at the time I was really deep in HP mode, and I should have. You're correct that the parallels and contrasts between them are instructive. (I would argue that Rowling isn't actually all that better--if at all--when it comes to character growth, but I'll definitely give to nod to her when it comes to plot details.)

Matthew,

Phantom is, indeed, awesome. Frustratingly, I haven't been able to read it to any of our younger kids yet; they keep getting bored. Maybe it's just one of those books that has be discovered on its own.

Indeed. I was a little shocked at how low Encyclopedia Brown came too. Not that the D'Aulaire's book would have counted, of course. That's a collection of myths, not a novel. But with your vote Taran Wanderer might have made it. Lackaday.

Magic School Bus wouldn't have made it either, actually. Those aren't chapter books. You see the difficulty.

Thanks for commenting, Elizabeth (and I hope you don't take my snarky tone personally; all in good fun, you know). If Taran really was that close to making it, I'll take the blame for the result; Melissa had told me about the poll, but I never thought of voting myself, and I should have. (She should have encouraged me more!) Melissa also told me that the Greek myths books wouldn't have made the qualifications. But would the Encyclopedia Brown books? They aren't chapter books; just collections of little mystery-short stories, without any consistent plot or character development through them. Oh well, I still loved them.

Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."